Subjectivity out of irony.

1 Subjectivity out of irony
2

3

4

5 LOUIS DE SAUSSURE and PETER SCHULZ
6
7

8

9

10

11

12 Abstract
13

14 Subjectivity plays an important role in how meaning is created and
15 construed. It concerns the expression of self and the representation of a
16 speaker’s perspective or point of view in the interaction with somebody
17 else. The subjectivity explored in this article concerns mainly one special
18 form of self-awareness insofar as it is related to irony. The argument of
19 this article will be carried out in three steps: We first will deal with the
20 main linguistic theories regarding irony. This will lead us to the conclusion
21 that irony — at least in some cases — involves a form of non-propositional
22 knowledge that needs to be identified and captured for irony. In a second
23 step, we will describe this type of non-propositional knowledge, in particular
24 distinguishing it from propositional knowledge. The discussion of non-
25 propositional knowledge as one marker of subjectivity will then lead us to
26 discuss irony — beyond its semantic utterances — as a personal disposition.
27 When we call utterances ironic we are referring to them as linguistic
28 constructs and we deal with the respective content of their declarative
29 statements, technically speaking, the proposition. In this contribution we
30 are interested in showing how ironic utterances lead back to a personal dis-
31 position. This move back should enrich, in some respects and to a certain
32 extent, our understanding of ironic utterances.
33

34 Keywords: irony; subjectivity; interpersoinal communication; deixis; in-
35 tentionality; Sperber and Wilson.
36

37

38 1. Irony in linguistic (pragmatic) theories
39

40 Within the study of language and language use, classical works on irony
41 before the twentieth century focused on the Aristotelian idea that irony
42 is an ‘antiphrastic’ literary figure, where the speaker says A when s/he

Semiotica 173–1/4 (2009), 397–416 0037–1998/09/0173–0397
DOI 10.1515/SEMI.2009.018 6 Walter de Gruyter

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398 L. de Saussure and P. Schulz

1 intends to convey B, and where B implies non-A. Unsurprisingly, a num-
2 ber of classical works on irony in speech communication can be found in
3 studies concerned with literature and rhetoric (in the sense of ‘style,’ ‘abil-
4 ity to use the resources of the language’), where stylistic e¤ects were at-
5 tributed to irony. Old dictionaries and encyclopedias make subtle distinc-
6 tions between irony and related figures (sarcasm, etc.). But still, at this
7 early stage, some psychological or, as we would say, ‘attitudinal’ parame-
8 ters are central to the definition of these figures. As an example, for the
9 French pedagogue Jullien, in the volume dedicated to ‘grammar’ of his
10 ´
‘complete course of education for ladies’ (Cours complet d’education pour
11 les filles) published in 1849, irony is, as expected, defined as a phrasal fig-
12 ure by means of which one communicates the contrary of what is said.
13 But, more interestingly, he explains that irony is used for some e¤ects
14 such as to ‘hurt a person’ (in particular with sarcasm, which he calls a
15 ‘cruel’ irony), to ‘fake’ an attitude in order to subtly communicate the op-
16 posite one, to despise, etc. (Jullien 1849: 114–116). In other words, if we
17 take this book as an appropriate document for standard thinking in the
18 nineteenth century — and it appears that if standard views of irony in
19 the nineteenth century were interested in types rather than in theory, and
20 were not putting to question the idea that irony is an ‘antiphrastic figure’
21 — it was already attributing psychological e¤ects to ironical utterances.
22 However such thinking did not explain precisely why one uses a ‘figure’
23 like irony instead of saying things non-ironically, i.e., it does not explain
24 why an ironic utterance can be identified as such by a hearer and not as
25 just a mistake, nor why and under which conditions false utterances can
26 trigger the psychological e¤ects they list.
27 A turning point in the study of irony and related figures from a linguis-
28 tic point of view arose when the notion of subjectivity was integrated as a
29 parameter for the analysis of linguistic forms; the study of figures of
30 speech became then a concern for linguistics, since linguistics became,
31 more generally, concerned with more than just the ‘linguistic system.’ In
32 the Continental world, this point of departure is marked by the works of
33 Charles Bally and of Emile Benveniste (1966, 1974).
34 The Swiss linguist Charles Bally was the first to systematically intro-
35 duce a notion of subject-specificity in linguistics when he founded the
36 approach of language-use he called stylistics (see notably Bally 1926,
37 1941, and 1965). He distinguished between the dictum — what we could
38 call today the ‘propositional content’ — and the modus, corresponding to
39 the way the dictum is presented. Given that the same conceptual meaning
40 — or propositional content — can be conveyed in various formats, Bally
41 assumes that the formatting of propositions is the main indication of sub-
42 jectivity in language. He thus analyzes through this distinction not only


Subjectivity out of irony 399

1 obvious cases of modality but a number of other e¤ects produced by the
2 specific choice of a wording by the speaker. The more influential French
3 linguist Emile Benveniste considered that the speaker’s identity is shaped
4 through interaction; a standpoint that opened up in the Continental tradi-
5 tion the integration into linguistic description of Freudian concepts to do
6 with the ‘self.’ Irony has, of course, a special place in this picture, directly
7 linked to the speaker’s relation to the interlocutor.
8 As for speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), irony is a violation
9 of the classical sincerity conditions; however, being ironic does not neces-
10 sarily mean being insincere, since the actual communicated content is
11 made accessible through the utterance, however inadequate the sentence
12 itself is with regard to this actual communicated content. Without any ap-
13 peal to subjectivity, Grice (1975) says that an ironic utterance is an ex-
14 ploitation of the maxim of quality, which is made manifest through voic-
15 ing, intonation, gestures, etc., in order to communicate a conversational
16 implicature corresponding to the contrary of the propositional content.
17 In that sense, irony overtly violates one of the conventions on which con-
18 versation regularly relies; this is a point worthy of attention, and we will
19 return to it at the end of the paper.
20 The Gricean idea — as well as the background idea that irony is an
21 ‘antiphrastic’ figure in general — was seriously opposed first by Sperber
22 and Wilson in a well-known paper (1978, 1981 [English version]), where
23 they showed the defects of the Gricean way of dealing with irony, and
24 where they made substantial propositions to solve them (see also Sperber
25 and Wilson 1995). They notably opposed the classical (and thus the Gri-
26 cean) view precisely with the worries we expressed before: neither the
27 classical approach nor the Gricean version of it explains the exact kind
28 of meaning conveyed by ironical utterances, nor the way an utterance is
29 identified as ironical. An example they give is a situation taking place in a
30 car, with a passenger saying to the driver ‘attention!’ when there is in fact
31 no danger. In such a case, the conventions of speech should, along the
32 Gricean lines, end up with the driver concluding that the utterance was
33 in fact ironical and meant ‘go on, there is no danger.’ Sperber and Wilson
34 rightly conclude that this explanation is intuitively inaccurate since it
35 wouldn’t come to the mind of a passenger to shout ‘attention’ in order
36 to simply communicate that there is no danger. They take this as a hint
37 that there is something else taking place in ironical uses of language that
38 must further be explained. They also show examples where the utterance
39 is not simply ‘false,’ therefore contradicting the classical ‘antiphrastic’
40 view. In particular, they quote an example from Voltaire’s Candide where
41 the two kings of two countries at war are described celebrating at the
42 same time their ‘victory’ after the battle. Since irony is not simply an



1 antiphrastic device, it implies another parameter. What they propose is a
2 threefold explanatory device. First, they suggest that the ironical use is
3 hypothesized by the hearer on the basis of the irrelevance of the literal in-
4 terpretation when confronted to the contextual facts mutually manifest to
5 the speaker and the hearer (for example, if it’s raining when someone says
6 ‘Good weather for a walk!’). Second — a very important point — Sperber
7 and Wilson suggest that an ironical utterance is a metarepresentational
8 one, in the particular sense that it is a representation (as any utterance is)
9 of another representation, as quotations are, for instance, whereas stan-
10 dard utterances are representations of (true or desirable) facts. This falls
11 quite well within the common intuition that irony creates a sort of imagi-
12 nary ‘scene’ where someone is represented and targeted as ridiculous (the
13 person, real or imaginary, who would actually say the considered utter-
14 ance non–ironically, whatever the circumstances, makes the propositional
15 content obviously wrong). This metarepresentational standpoint is there-
16 fore directly related to a speciﬁc — metarepresentational — ability of the
17 mind. For Sperber and Wilson, irony is a case of ‘mention’ (since the
18 speaker mentions a speech or thought attributed to someone else) and
19 not a case of ‘description.’ Third, they introduce the idea that an ironic
20 utterance implicitly conveys a propositional attitude that corresponds,
21 roughly, to the proposition being considered ridiculous by the speaker.
22 This attitude is counted in the theory as the key to the reward, or e¤ect,
23 for the supplementary cognitive e¤ort needed to achieve relevance on the
24 basis of an utterance that is obviously false. In this respect, irony com-
25 pares with other types of literally meaningless utterances, either by virtue
26 of their logical form, or by virtue of their redundancy with mutually
27 known information. For instance, tautological utterances are supple-
28 mented pragmatically with various kinds of enrichments (not attitude)
29 that give sense to them in a given situation (as when Men are men is
30 used to mean Your husband is as boring as all other members of the cate-
31 gory). Still, for instance, a trivial piece of information like Nice weather
32 can be enriched in various ways in order to make some sense of it that
33 would be labelled relevant by the interpretive system. This propositional
34 attitude is the necessary pragmatic enrichment that, in the end, distin-
35 guishes irony from 1) other types of erroneous utterances and 2) of other
36 types of metarepresentational utterances.
37 French linguist Oswald Ducrot (1984) developed his own theory of
38 irony that draws upon Benveniste’s ideas through what he calls (after the
39 works of Voloshinov) polyphony. His idea is that one utterance can give
40 access to several competing meanings, with regard to which the speaker
41 communicates his/her commitment or rejection. Ducrot’s analysis re-
42 quires a split of the ‘speaker’ into several subjective instances; in this



1 respect, Ducrot is in line with Benveniste’s view of the (Freudian or not)
2 self as constructed by interaction, a view also held by contemporary
3 approaches in Conversation Analysis. Ducrot, provocatively, rejects the
4 idea that the speaking subject should be considered a unique individual
5 and proposes to split the speaker into the Locutor as such (as being an
6 actor of discourse), the Speaker-as-a-being-in-the-world (the human per-
7 son), and one or several polyphonic Enunciators, i.e., existing or non-
8 existing instances (which are not deﬁned in the theory) represented, or,
9 as Ducrot puts it, ‘put on stage’ by the utterance. As far as irony is con-
10 cerned, Ducrot says that the Locutor represents an Enunciator responsi-
11 ble for the literal meaning and, by means of making the concerned utter-
12 ance in the context, is in contradiction with the Enunciator (and, indeed,
13 makes fool of the Enunciator), an idea that recalls some psychoanalytic
14 concepts such as the dubbing of the self into several dialectical instances.
15 Ducrot says that the Enunciator targeted by the ironical utterance can be
16 a given individual, including the speaker at some past time, or an imagi-
17 nary individual ( just as Sperber and Wilson suggest as well).
18 On the epistemological side, Sperber and Wilson have over Ducrot the
19 advantage of elegance and simplicity, plus the fact that they don’t need
20 problematic objects like ‘Enunciators’ in their explanation of irony. How-
21 ever, one point can be considered more intuitively sound in Ducrot’s ver-
22 sion. For Sperber and Wilson, the speaker’s attitude has scope over a
23 proposition and not over an individual. Even though for them it is clear
24 that the speaker can express a judgment on an individual by means of
25 irony, this happens only through the mediation of some propositional at-
26 titude. Ducrot, by contrast, includes straightforwardly, as a necessary pa-
27 rameter of irony, that someone, real or fake, is targeted as responsible for
28 the ridiculous utterance. In other words, subjectivities are more directly
29 invoked in Ducrot’s model than in Sperber and Wilson’s one. This prob-
30 ably does not save Ducrot from the above criticism, but raises a more
31 fundamental question: should irony be viewed as targeting a proposi-
32 tional representation or a person? We think it is the latter.
33 We will try now to sustain this global view on irony through a number
34 of arguments before we address more crucial points about irony and sub-
35 jectivity. First, we notice that natural languages is typically associated
36 with ironic adjectives that talk about attitudes one can have over individ-
37 uals, not over abstract objects like representations or propositions. For
38 example, despite the fact that irony has informational properties such as
39 incongruity, it is a fact that someone can be hated for icy or cold irony,
40 for vicious irony, etc. In French, one ﬁnds typically ironie mordante (biting
41 irony) or ironie glaciale (icy irony). A quick survey signals similar types of
42 typical combinations in other languages ( pungente ironia in Italian, for



1 example). Interestingly, these adjectives, when used to qualify an attitude,
2 apply categorial restrictions to the complements towards which the atti-
3 tude is directed: they allow animated individuals but combine with di‰-
4 culty with objects such as representations. In other words, it looks natural
5 that one is icy towards another individual, or biting, or vicious, but rather
6 bizarre that one harbors such attitudes towards words or paintings or to-
7 wards any other types of abstract objects. In other words, it looks intui-
8 tively sound that irony has to do with particular mental states, attitudes,
9 which are directed towards some individual, and not towards a proposi-
10 tion (although one may wish to maintain that the attitude can target the
11 individual only through a proposition). Actually, one could propose a
12 slightly more fine-grained analysis of irony where not only there is an at-
13 titude shown over a proposition, by means of which an attitude is shown
14 towards an individual, but through a ‘propositional attitude’ i.e. not the
15 fact that the proposition is ‘ridiculous’ but simply that it is ‘false.’ Besides
16 this, what is typically ridiculous is an individual, not a representation
17 (therefore not an utterance, not even a thought) by itself. In the same
18 view, we think it’s worth taking into consideration the intuition that
19 when an ironic attitude is attributed to an abstract object, an e¤ect of per-
20 sonalization is — still intuitively speaking — obtained, as in irony of fate,
21 where fate is represented as having an ironic intention.
22 Second, irony is not simply a non-literal utterance conveying implicitly
23 some other information that could be spelled out without loss. As a mat-
24 ter of fact, an ironical utterance cannot be ‘translated’ in a full-fledged
25 propositional format (Saussure in press). Reformulation (2) of (1) simply
26 loses the ironical content, although it conserves the informational
27 substance:
28
(1) What nice weather for a walk! (when it’s raining).
29

30
(2) It is raining and you said the weather would be nice, therefore you
31
are ridiculous.
32 It conforms to our opinion that irony involves a non-propositional con-
33 tent, dealing with emotions or attitudes, and which needs to be identified
34 and captured by a hearer for irony to exist at all.
35 Third, there are some examples of ironical utterances where the literal
36 utterance is not true; still, some components of it are indeed asserted by
37 the speaker. This happens in a number of situations, such as the follow-
38 ing. Suppose there is some negotiation going on between A and B; A
39 puts forward fallacious arguments, blu¤s, and lies; and as a consequence
40 of these fallacious arguments, B accepts in the end an unfair deal. Sup-
41 pose now A tells the story to his business partner C, and C says to A,
42 with admiration:



1 (3) You’re really a bad guy!
2
In such a case, not only is it both true and false at the same time that A is
3
a bad guy, but, we think, it is asserted that A is at the same time bad and
4
good. A is bad with respect to the conventional standards of morality, be-
5
cause he made use of unfair arguments. But A is good with respect to his
6
skills in promoting the interests of the company.
7
This case seems to us particularly interesting, and we will develop this
8
point later in this paper: in a way, in (3) the fact that A did not follow the
9
‘good’ behavior — say, the conventions, that hold in a neutral, global
10
setting — is evaluated as ‘good’ in a particular setting, here the situation
11
of (economic) antagonism or war. Therefore, it seems to us that (3) deals
12
not only with truth and falsity, as many ironic utterances do, but also
13
with a complex thought involving opposing concepts at the same time
14
but at di¤erent levels of understanding: bad with respect to X implies
15
good with respect to Y. At ﬁrst sight, an analysis of (3) as metarepresen-
16
tational could seem questionable, since the speaker seems to think ‘sin-
17
cerely’ that A is a ‘bad’ guy, simply implicating that A is therefore a
18
good guy. Now it is also true that (3), in this setting, is not interpreted as
19
simply ‘sincere’: the speaker should be disapprobative, not congratulating
20
as he is in our example. It su‰ces to think that C, saying (3), is also rais-
21
ing his ﬁnger and moving it back and forth like a mother does when a kid
22
behaves badly to see that, clearly, some instance is ‘put on the stage’ by
23
C, and ‘quoted’ in (3). (3) is still completely metarepresentational.
24
Irony is not necessarily a matter of uttering a false proposition. What
25
seems to remain necessary for irony is the presence of an implicit propo-
26
sitional attitude of disagreement, communicating that the speaker thinks
27
that, in such a context, this particular sentence would be ridiculous if ut-
28
tered sincerely. The person targeted as ridiculous in the case of (3) is the
29
imaginary individual who would condemn A’s attitude sincerely. Here,
30
that person is obeying the common principles of morality and of conven-
31
tional expectations. Later in this paper, we will suggest that irony in fact
32
always involve some discrepancy with standard conventions, and we will
33
suggest that this is precisely one of the keys to subjectivity in irony. This
34
leads us back to the question of what is central to irony. We would like to
35
observe in this respect that irony is not a ‘stand-alone’ phenomenon,
36
clearly separated from all other phenomena of speech. Notably, free indi-
37
rect speech utterances can present a very high similarity, at least intui-
38
tively, with ironical utterances, or call very strongly for ironical e¤ects.
39
An example of free indirect speech like (4) can bear a strong ironical load:
40

41 (4) I met John this morning. You know him: he can’t bear it anymore,
42 his wife is a nightmare, his job is a pain, and all that kind of thing.



1 If (4) is intended to mean that the propositions he can’t bear it any more,
2 his wife is a nightmare, and his job is a pain map, literally or not, onto
3 what John actually expressed this morning, then we are looking at a case
4 of free indirect speech, thus a metarepresentation of the content to which
5 the speaker does not commit. Just like irony. And, indeed, here the quotes
6 look ironic. Irony can be absent of free indirect speech (attitudes like
7 compassion can exist in free indirect speech). But since irony is implicitly
8 metarepresentational, then it could well be analyzed as a specific case of
9 reported speech or thought, or ‘alleged’ reported speech, a case where the
10 speaker conveys an attitude of the type P is ridiculous. In this respect,
11 irony looks closer than ever to things like implicit quotation, or, as stated
12 before, implicit metarepresentation.
13 What shall we do, then, with utterances that would be called, intui-
14 tively, ‘ironical,’ but that at first glance do not seem to involve an ironical
15 propositional attitude? Let us briefly look at (5), uttered by an interviewer
16 provoking a job applicant with a dose of humor:
17
(5) I guess you are a laid-back person, as Australians are.
18

19 Here, the most important features of irony seem not to be met: the
20 speaker does not seem to provide a metarepresentation of someone utter-
21 ing the proposition, and it seems that there isn’t any ironical proposi-
22 tional attitude. In other words, the author simply seems to commit
23 himself to a proposition, to the extent authorized by the modalities, and
24 nothing else. Of course, this utterance could be completely ironic in a
25 marked context, for example when it’s mutually manifest that the speaker
26 fakes, or quotes, a judgment that is obviously ridiculous with regard to
27 other mutually manifest information, meaning that, of course, the desig-
28 nated person is anything but a laid-back person.
29 Yet besides this possibility, if a certain tone, or even a gesture, accom-
30 panies this utterance, the inference of an attitude closely related to irony
31 can be drawn. It is enough for this to happen that it is mutually manifest
32 that the speaker should not say this according to the standard conven-
33 tions in the particular setting. In the formal setting of a job interview,
34 the speaker, afterwards, would probably admit that he was, in one way
35 or another, being ironic when uttering (5). Actually, a contrast between
36 what should be said and what is said can, according to the setting, give
37 rise to an ironic e¤ect. Here, in the context, it is clear that the speaker
38 does not agree to the full meaning of laid-back person, since that is obvi-
39 ously exaggerated. However, we would like to emphasize the fact that in
40 such a case, the speaker, by the obvious discrepancy between what should
41 be said and what is said, communicates that he is taking some distance
42 with the actual propositional content of his utterance: he does not commit



1 himself to the propositional content in extenso. Thus, an explanation of
2 this e¤ect could be that the speaker, precisely, metarepresents the thought
3 (or speech) of a fictitious individual who would completely endorse the
4 propositional content of the utterance. In this respect, (5) belongs to a
5 category that is closely related to free indirect speech and irony: it is just
6 another type of metarepresentation; say, hyperbolic. But it need not to be
7 hyperbolic. It is enough that anything in the context makes obvious that
8 the speaker does not express his point of view for this kind of e¤ect to
9 arise; understatements are likewise. In the end, everything leads us to
10 think that there is indeed an ironic component in (5). This component is
11 based on the fact that (5) is said while it is mutually manifest that the
12 speaker cannot plausibly tell here his real thoughts about the hearer. An
13 argument for this analysis is that the setting of a job interview constrains
14 the hearer to avoid an o¤ended reaction, therefore, the hearer assumes
15 that there is an ironic component, on the basis of which is triggered the
16 provocative e¤ect that is automatically felt here.
17 Two observations need however to be added about (5). First, it is no-
18 ticeable that in this case, it is still possible for the hearer to suppose that
19 the speaker believes in P at a lower degree (in a weak sense), depending
20 upon other accessible information at the hearer’s disposal. Second, the
21 idea that the propositional content of (5) is presented together with an at-
22 titude needs to be questioned. If it is a consequence of the process of un-
23 derstanding of (5), in the aforementioned context, that the speaker does
24 not believe (in the strong sense) what he says, then it is unavoidable that
25 (5) will be understood together with a propositional attitude of rejection.
26 This attitude however doesn’t follow the scheme of a clear-cut distinction:
27 it is subject to degrees. The degree to which the attitude of rejection holds
28 towards the proposition should be directly determined by the di¤erence
29 between the degree to which (5) is actually thought by the hearer as be-
30 lieved (lower sense) by the speaker, and the higher degree of belief (stron-
31 ger sense) that expresses (5) in itself.
32 Maybe this attitude should be more fine-grained than ‘ridiculousness’ or
33 ‘rejection.’ If we admit a notion of degree for the strength of the ironic
34 attitude, it is likely that the analysis should end up with attitudes labelled
35 like ‘ridiculous to degree n.’ This task is not the focus of this paper. What
36 we want to stress here is that irony has to do with di¤erence between ex-
37 pected forms and actually realized forms, that it is about metarepresenting
38 a thought with a degree of non-commitment to what is said, which is under-
39 stood as an ironic attitude. There are strong ironies, where the whole of a
40 sentence embedded in an implicit quotation is made ridiculous in the con-
41 text, and there are cases like (5), where the quotation is actually about a spe-
42 cific lexical item (here laid-back), which we would like to call weak ironies.



1 Looking at all these cases, we can see how the interpretive process goes:
2 the meaning is obtained by the speaker by supplementing information
3 (such as metarepresentation and propositional attitude) to the actual ma-
4 terial on the basis of contextual constraints, either the factual elements of
5 the deictic situation of speech (if it’s raining, in (1)) or the conventional
6 framework that holds in this particular deictic situation of speech, as in
7 (3). But all these elements do not su‰ce to explain the ironic e¤ect. If we
8 explain all this to a person who has no idea whatsoever about irony, that
9 person will have some knowledge about irony but will probably not be
10 capable of experiencing irony or, therefore, to understand exactly what
11 irony is. The reason for this was expressed before: an ironic utterance
12 cannot be translated into a full-fledged proposition without loosing its
13 ironic component. The conclusion we drew from this was that irony is
14 fundamentally a matter of non-propositional content.
15 In order to proceed further, we need now to turn to the notion of
16 non-propositional knowledge, which will be our link to the notion of
17 subjectivity.
18

19

20 2. Propositional knowledge versus non-propositional knowledge
21

22 Ironic utterances show something more about the subject, the individual
23 who utters the ironic statement; more precisely, it shows something about
24 the particular way the subject holds in a particular way this ‘opinion.’
25 Ironic utterances, whenever they are not intended as simply ornamental
26 figures, do not say a lot the utterance itself, but about the way the subject
27 refers to the content of his utterance. More than other utterances, an
28 ironic one makes it intuitively evident that a specific subject refers in a
29 particular way to a certain proposition. The utterance refers back to the
30 specific way in which the subject stands to what he had said, knows about
31 that which he had said.
32 This brings us to the concept of ‘subjectivity.’ Among linguists, the
33 notion subjectivity concerns, for example, expression of self and the
34 representation of a speaker’s — or, more generally, a locutionary agent’s
35 — perspective or point of view in discourse (cf. for example Stein
36 and Wright 1995, besides references quoted in the above section). But
37 there are many approaches to subjectivity. Among other professional re-
38 searchers on language the word subject and its derivative subjectivity tend
39 to evoke a grammatical association: subject as distinct from direct object,
40 for example. In some contexts, subjectivity contrasts with objectivity in
41 suggesting something ‘soft,’ unverifiable, even suspicious. Indeed, it has
42 been observed (Lyons 1982: 101) that the notion of subjectivity plays var-



1 ious roles in European languages. While the English ‘subjectivity’ has re-
2 cently assumed — by virtue of its opposition with a positivistic interpre-
3 tation of ‘objectivity’ — a somehow pejorative connotation, the French
4 ´
‘subjectivite’ and the German ‘Subjektivita do not necessarily carry this
¨t’
5 pejorative connotation of unreliability and failure to correspond with the
6 facts. In the following, we’ll deal with ‘subjectivity’ as far as it concerns
7 the mind or the consciousness of oneself with respect to the world; thus
8 we need not here consider anything inherited from psychoanalysis, nor
9 the idea that subjectivity would be somehow ‘magical’ and therefore es-
10 caping analysis (an idea that often legitimates vague and metaphorical
11 explanations of subjectivity in some frameworks). Subjectivity plays an
12 important role in how meaning is created and construed. It concerns the
13 expression of self and the representation of a speaker’s perspective or
14 point of view in interaction with somebody else; it constitutes one special
15 form of self-awareness insofar as it is related to basic perceptions and at-
16 titudes. In this respect, subjectivity leads back to the way in which the
17 subject holds a certain opinion, belief, etc., about objects, how s/he knows
18 about them. In sum, subjectivity is a capacity of the human being to
19 know in a certain way, which is not made by a set of ‘assumptions,’ facts
20 about himself (through, in particular, proprioceptive abilities, that is, ca-
21 pacities to be aware of the position of my legs, of the attitude of my face,
22 etc.) and facts about the outer world (through, in particular, perceptive
23 abilities). Some say that perception and proprioception are inputs for
24 awareness of the concerned facts, they are not themselves these facts;
25 others say that there is nothing else than perception itself; we will not
26 enter this debate since it would take us too far from our main points, but
27 the first attitude seems to us the most reasonable one.
28 Now, whoever is interested in the general structure of knowledge will
29 be first inevitably confronted with the fact that knowledge always has to
30 do with how something is known about something. This fundamental pre-
31 supposition can be expanded to include the fact that knowing has an ob-
32 ject di¤erent from itself, at least formally. In other words, the content of
33 knowledge is necessarily di¤erent from its object. An additional distinc-
34 tion of knowledge is connected with this initial approach to the subject:
35 whoever wants to know about the structure and possible contents of
36 knowledge will be referred to the domain of sentences. Here, knowledge
37 (along with its contents) seems to be objectifiable in a form that can be
38 grasped like an object. The methodological advantages of the coupling
39 of knowledge with a linguistic entity, such as a statement, are easy to
40 perceive. Namely, a statement, as a linguistic entity, can always be objec-
41 tified and identified with no special di‰culty. With the help of a sign sys-
42 tem, statements are observable and evident. The advantages of that can



1 be clearly seen by thinking of a comparable situation in which someone
2 tries to answer the question of the structures of knowledge not on the ba-
3 sis of statements but, on the basic of, for instance, the phenomena of con-
4 sciousness. These phenomena can not be objectified and identified in the
5 same way as propositional statements. As such, thus, they cannot be com-
6 municated to anyone else through propositional statements. So, a person
7 is never quite sure whether the other partner involved in the discussion is
8 really oriented to the same thing as s/he him/herself is. It is only in the
9 domain of statements that knowledge seems to be tangible, like an object:
10 it is expected of anyone who claims to know something that s/he can
11 present and communicate the contents of that knowledge in the form of
12 statements. This certainly applies not only to philosophy, but just as well
13 to every other positive science: here, especially, nothing that cannot be
14 represented and communicated in the form of statements is recognized
15 as a possible insight and admitted for discussion. For in the positive
16 approach to sciences, sentences and statements form the pivot of all
17 understanding.
18 The form of knowledge described thus far (that is representable and
19 communicable in statements) is generally called propositional knowledge
20 in philosophical discussions. Whoever has propositional knowledge knows
21 something about something. In regard to an object, he knows that some-
22 thing is definitely the case. Propositional knowledge always refers to an
23 identifiable object of knowledge. Furthermore, since it can be embodied
24 in a linguistic entity in the form of a statement, propositional knowledge
25 is always able to be communicated to others.
26 In order to describe how ironical utterances give information about the
27 personality itself of the speaker, one has to clarify how background ca-
28 pacities of the speaker or non-propositional knowledge is indeed knowl-
29 edge. Certainly, it is not easy to clarify its uniqueness in comparison
30 with other forms of knowledge. Non-propositional knowledge has been
31 reintroduced into the current philosophical discussion — and over and
32 beyond it — particularly by Gilbert Ryle. Ryle first introduced a distinc-
33 tion between knowledge in the sense of ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’
34 in his book The Concept of Mind (1986 [1949]: 25–61). In his formulation,
35 knowing-how (or, as it is also sometimes called, ‘embodied knowledge’) is
36 a characteristic of the expert: someone who acts, makes judgments, and
37 so forth without explicitly reflecting on the principles or rules involved in
38 this activity. The expert thus acts without having a systematic theory
39 about his or her actions; s/he just performs them skillfully without delib-
40 eration or focused attention. Knowing that, by contrast, involves full con-
41 sciously accessible knowledge that can be articulated. It is characteristic
42 of a person who is learning a skill through explicit instruction, recitation



1 of rules, attention to his/her movements, etc. While such declarative
2 knowledge may be needed for the acquisition of skills, the argument
3 goes, it is no longer necessary for practicing those skills once the novice
4 has become an expert. Indeed it does appear, as Polanyi (1974 [1958]) ar-
5 gued, that when we acquire a skill, we acquire a corresponding under-
6 standing that defies full articulation.
7 One may liken 1the special feature of this form of knowledge to the ex-
8 perience of a physician, craftsman or businessman. In this sense, experi-
9 ence means knowledge that does not easily lend itself to objectification.
10 In contrast to propositional knowledge, the type of knowledge repre-
11 sented by experience does not have an identifiable object of knowledge;
12 on the contrary, it is related to a field of knowledge or, in other words, it
13 is domain-specific. The person who possesses experience has thereby, con-
14 jointly, the ability to move about in the applicable field with certainty and
15 to adequately react to all situations with which s/he comes into contact.
16 Traditionally, this type of knowledge has always been relegated to the
17 categorical types of dispositions. Dispositions cannot be pinned down di-
18 rectly: although evident in their e¤ects, they are never totally manifested
19 by any of them.
20 We can thus distinguish between non-propositional knowledge and the
21 propositional type of knowledge by pointing out to the fact that the for-
22 mer does not represent simply the sum total of the knowledge of a certain
23 area. Experience is rather a practical familiarity with things which fall
24 into its area. Whoever possesses experience has the ability to move about
25 in a certain field of knowledge. The degree of experience manifests itself
26 in the ability of its bearer to rightly discern things in this area. The spe-
27 cific familiarity that one possesses with regard to functional things mani-
28 fests itself in the ability to deal with them in an adequate way.
29 In this perspective, still another characteristic of non-propositional
30 knowledge must be taken into consideration. Whereas ‘knowing that’
31 hardly divulges anything about the bearer, non-propositional knowledge
32 is acutely dependent on its bearer. Because of its dispositional structure,
33 ‘knowing how’ is a form of knowledge that can exist only to the extent
34 that its bearer identifies him/herself with it. One can never dissociate one-
35 self from it in the same way as one can dissociate oneself from one’s own
36 statement and its contents. To be sure, propositional knowledge also re-
37 mains dependent on a possible conveyor, but such a conveyor need not
38 be defined individually. Therefore one can talk about a sentence, its con-
39 tents and its structure without having to speak about the individual
40 expressing the sentence. By contrast, it is certainly not possible to speak
41 about certain experience without, at the same time, taking into account
42 the authority who is the possessor of this experience.



1 A further di¤erence between the propositional and non-propositional
2 forms of knowledge seems to lie in communicability. Propositional
3 knowledge is embodied in a linguistic expression and, in this form, can
4 be always communicated to others. More precisely, the hearer can always
5 raise a plausible hypothesis about the proposition(s) the speaker intends
6 to convey by means of the linguistic stimulus. Nothing comparable
7 applies to experiential knowledge. For experience cannot be simply
8 transferred from one person to another; one can only acquire it by one-
9 self. Experiential knowledge incorporates the process of acquisition as
10 its indispensable part. In order to acquire propositional knowledge, it is
11 always possible to extract subtasks and to delegate their completion to
12 others. The operation of modern institutionalized science is based on this
13 possibility. However, experience cannot be delegated. Although assis-
14 tance and guidance can save the learner detours and dead ends, the spe-
15 cific e¤orts required in order to gain an experience cannot be spared by
16 guidance and assistance.
17 The previous description of non-propositional knowledge had been de-
18 scribed on the basis of experience, but could be equally applied to other
19 forms of non-propositional knowledge such as abilities, talents or discern-
20 ment. Summarizing, it concerns (1) knowledge that, in the strict sense,
21 can be neither fully objectified nor (2) communicated, that is fully em-
22 bedded into a semantic structure; which (3) does not directly intend its
23 object and defy, therefore, the category of error; which, as a (4) disposi-
24 tional characteristic, is always related to the authority of the bearer and is
25 thus able to reveal reality to its possessor in an non-comparable way. As
26 to the last point, it should be emphasized that human familiarity with the
27 world is attained only in a limited measure by understanding true state-
28 ments about it.
29

30
3. Where does the reflection on non-propositional knowledge meet the
31
question of irony?
32

33 As stated earlier, the term ‘subjectivity’ can mean something like the
34 quality or condition of viewing things exclusively through the medium of
35 one’s own mind or individuality (cf. Oxford English Dictionary). For ex-
36 ample, in talking about films or novels we often employ such expressions
37 as ‘from our point of view.’ This is one way to introduce subjectivity.
38 Subjectivity here has something to do with our special idiosyncratic ‘per-
39 ceiving’ and also, perhaps, with ‘emotions.’ In this way we refer to some-
40 one’s perception: it is clear that the term is not used to describe primarily
41 what the film is about — a particular character, topic or theme, but
42 rather to describe in some way how the film presents itself to us.



1 The aforementioned description of non-propositional knowledge leads
2 us back to the question of how ironic utterances can be understood as a
3 semantic representation of mental processes or, more precisely, of a spe-
4 cific attitude. At this point, we are not interested in irony as merely a rhe-
5 torical technique that allows speakers to express something in an indirect
6 way that could have also been expressed in a direct way. Instead, we are
7 only interested in showing that ironic speech should not be understood
8 exclusively from its semantic reference to the utterance. One should also
9 consider the speaker’s intention as well as the e¤ects s/he wants to pro-
10 duce on the side of the addressee. S/he who chooses irony as a specific
11 form of utterance does not want to communicate by means of a specific
12 content, but through the medium or form of his/her speech. It is through
13 ironic speech that somebody refers by verbal means to something that lit-
14 erally could not be expressed, but that, however, has its own logic. Irony
15 seems to be a proper means by which one refers to certain logic that does
16 not follow the structure of a verbal argument, and, consequently, cannot
17 be communicated by means of entire sentences. Whoever uses or under-
18 stands irony in this way refers always to sensible elements in the situation
19 of speech that cannot be fully verbalized. With regard to the impossibility
20 of fully verbalizing some crucial contents of ironical utterances, irony can
21 be comparable to metaphors: when trying to translate metaphor into a
22 literal form, one ends up with a form that carries less meaning than the
23 metaphorical utterance.
24 The meaning and the function of a non-propositional knowledge, indis-
25 solubly linked with the one knowing, is exemplified in the person of
26 Plato’s Socrates. One paradigmatic example for his irony is Socrates’ to-
27 ken that he knows that he does not know anything. This sentence is ironic
28 insofar as it doesn’t harmonize with the knowledge that Socrates demon-
29 strates in many dialogues with other people. However, if one would con-
30 sider as a kind of knowledge only that which has been verbally expressed,
31 Socrates indeed seems to be a person with rather scarce knowledge. There
32 are only very few statements concerning some specific knowledge that he
33 utters. And he usually never maintains or proclaims to know things. His
34 knowledge would have to be considered quite modest indeed if it were to
35 be judged by the number of sentences that he endorsed as accurate. When
36 he admits his ignorance, he is not using irony of the trivial type, which
37 means the opposite of the wording expressed. The knowledge that sets
38 Socrates apart from all his dialogue partners is not at all the type that
39 can be represented and expressed as assertions. Rather, it is a kind of
40 ability that proves itself able to deal with assertions, to examine them in
41 relation to their obvious and concealed prerequisites and to refer them
42 back to their author. This knowledge can neither be disassociated from



1 the person nor can it be objectified. It is manifested in a capacity for the-
2 oretical and practical discernment by which it is characterized, far exceed-
3 ing all its rivals.
4

5

6
7
4. Irony and the technique of deictic messages
8

9 Irony, at least in the broad sense in which this term had been introduced
10 previously, has much to do with subjectivity, itself having much to do
11 with the deictic situation of speech in its various aspects (physical, but
12 also conventional). Language is equipped with numerous devices dealing
13 with the situation of speech, in particular indexical (or deictic) expres-
14 sions. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon approach to indexicality focuses on ref-
15 erential problems (Perry 1979, 2000; Kaplan 1989; Castaneda 1967), the
16 French tradition has theorized deictic expressions through the idea that
17 they carry a very particular part of meaning that is lost when reformulat-
18 ing things non-deictically; this very part of meaning is about subjectivity.
19 This idea, of course, has also roots in the works of Buhler (1990 [1934]).
¨
20 Benveniste expanded his linguistic theory to a global theory of subjectiv-
21 ity in interaction: through reference to the situation of speech, the hearer
22 and the speaker constitute themselves as ‘subjectivities’ (this time with
23 some psychoanalytical load in the meaning of ‘subjectivity’). More evi-
24 dently, it is the case that the situation of face-to-face interaction in a par-
25 ticular situation is the typical place where phatic communication is at
26 work; it is nothing new to suggest that deictic expressions have also a
27 phatic function in many circumstances. The phatic part of communica-
28 tion taking place is, as with irony, non-propositional: ‘phatic’ cannot be
29 reduced to a full-fledged adequate ‘translation’ of the phatic component.
30 With the term phatic communication, a technique of deictic messages, we
31 refer to all those features of a verbal argument by which it becomes
32 understandable for the addressee, except in its semantic representation.
33 Among such features we count here are the form, material and circum-
34 stances under which the verbal entity is uttered.
35 Nowadays we are inclined to elaborate the chances that the external-
36 ization of language and knowledge o¤ers us. We are accustomed to start
37 our analysis from the verbal forms. The advantage of this proceeding is
38 evident: It allows us to fix and determine knowledge and insights of ver-
39 bal forms even if the bearer of this utterance or the speaker is not present.
40 One might compare the underlying attitude with that of a mathematician:
41 Whoever analyses logical forms of verbal arguments behaves in a similar
42 way as a mathematician does with countable units and figures.



1 In contrast to all those direct communications, phatic components do
2 not have any predicative structure. Predicative assertions always underlie
3 truth conditions, they are necessarily true or false. Phatic components,
4 instead, usually do not have any predicative structure. The same holds
5 about parts of the meanings of indexicals, as argued in Saussure (forth-
6 coming). Utterances, besides describing a fact, can show something, imi-
7 tate something, or give semiotic access to something di¤erent. But these
8 utterances never do so by showing something as something. Conse-
9 quently, they do not refer to the principle of truth. One can show some-
10 body else a certain thing (imitating, for example, how a certain protago-
11 nist in a movie is walking), and one might also not show it. But it is
12 impossible to show somebody doing something ‘wrong.’ This is only pos-
13 sible insofar as the one doing so is inducing the addressee to certain infer-
14 ences. Phatic or deictic messages, and other types of messages anchored
15 in the deictic situation, cannot be a‰rmed or declined; one can only say,
16 whether they have been done or not. Of course, one might also speak
17 about these ‘deictic messages,’ but doing so one needs a direct form of
18 communication. However, these direct forms do not change at all the cat-
19 egorical structure of the ‘deictic messages.’
20 Usually, in a normal conversation these deictic messages are not a part
21 of what the speaker intends to say. But in written texts, these deictic ele-
22 ments could become an important part of the narration itself. Leaving
23 language proper aside for a minute: answers can be given in a written
24 text, implicitly, by the very action it presents. Once again a reference to
25 Plato, although we might study several other authors of literary or philo-
26 sophical texts (the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard would be an-
27 other good example) who used these means intentionally. What usually
28 happens in Platonic dialogues and what constitutes their dramatic or mi-
29 metic quality is that the most that is told to the reader about the ﬁgure of
30 Socrates is given by Socrates’ actions. Of course, in many dialogues we
31 learn about Socrates by explicit statements of his dialogue partners. But
32 this is not to be compared with all what we learn about his experience
33 and procedural knowledge that can be communicated only by means of
34 these ‘deictic messages.’ Socrates’ ability to guide a conversation, bringing
35 his partners into an aporetic situation — this kind of knowledge could
36 never be completely verbalized.
37

38
39 5. Conclusion: Irony as a form departing from expected forms
40

41 At this stage, we can come back to the intuitions we presented at the end
42 of section 1. The approaches of irony we mentioned in the ﬁrst section do



1 not say much about the link between irony and convention, even though
2 Grice considers irony as a kind of non-respect of the convention he names
3 ‘maxim of quality,’ although he doesn’t go very far on this point. In fact,
4 we suggest that ironic utterances are such either because they depart from
5 a certain linguistic convention (such as ‘say what you believe is true’),
6 either by intentional flows upon the expected properly applied convention
7 or by misapplying certain convention to a given situation in which it is
8 not proper according to standards.
9 We find it notable that one can speak about irony in music (e.g., in
10 some pieces by Haydn) in the sense that the composer intentionally mis-
11 uses a given stylistic convention. For instance, he may use folk elements
12 in a minuet, although the minuet was a most aristocratic and elevated
13 type of dance. Or he may write a very aristocratic minuet but form cross-
14 rhythms at a given point that would cause a mismatch of dance-steps of
15 the elevated dancers if the minuet was really danced. It is interesting that
16 several authors have pointed to the fact that this sort of irony in music
17 allows the composer to expose his subjectivity because in this way he dis-
18 tances himself from conventions, instead of having his personality hidden
19 behind the strict respect of conventions (see Agawu and Mirka 2008).
20 This is close to the Romantic ideal of the author with a strong emphasis
21 upon subjectivity (all this issue has plenty to do with the concept of joke
22 in the aesthetics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century). It is
23 highly interesting that the birth of subjectivity at the beginning of the
24 nineteenth century was really out of irony, as we say in our title.
25 Transposing this kind of irony onto language, one could say that the
26 irony of a given utterance — in addition to being about propositions and
27 persons — can be about conventions of a given language per se. We
28 mean, in particular, stylistic conventions of language use specific to cer-
29 tain circles or certain situations (e.g., scientific language, journalist jar-
30 gon, dialect, teenager slang, and so forth). By using a bit of slang or dia-
31 lect during a conference paper, the speaker may call forth an ironic e¤ect
32 as an example of irony not about any person but either about the situa-
33 tion of a conference panel or of the topic he discusses.
34 This discussion of non-propositional knowledge as one marker of sub-
35 jectivity leads us naturally to discuss irony — beyond its semantic content
36 — as a personal ‘disposition.’ In other words, at this point of our argu-
37 ment we would take the step of showing how, by an ironic use of conven-
38 tion, the speaker detaches him- or herself from a given convention in
39 order to show that, although informed about it and accepting it as a so-
40 cial contract, s/he is not in a relation of full dependency, or ‘identical’
41 with a social contract but — as an individual — has his/her own particu-
42 lar position in front of it. In this perspective, irony is not an expertise in



1 some particular skill or ability (e.g., an ability to use convention) but an
2 ability of moving around in reality as such, that is to say, in his/her
3 understanding of reality, in his/her position in front of reality in its
4 entirety or taken in its particular segment. Irony, in this respect, is one
5 of the most important resources the human being has to show a kind of
6 independence, a kind of creative freedom, thanks to which s/he escapes
7 from the norm, which is always expected, by default, to be applied.
8

9

10
Note
11

12
1. One can already see an incipient clear indication of the di‰culty of adequately grasping
13 the uniqueness of this non-propositional knowledge by observing the German transla-
14 tor’s dilemma of how to express these terms in German. While ‘knowing that’ or ‘to
15 know that’ can be assigned to what we call propositional knowledge (expressed simply
16 as ‘knowledge’ by Ryle’s translator), there is no appropriate expression for ‘knowing
how’ or ‘to know how.’ Therefore, when referring to this form of knowledge, the Ger-
17
man translation speaks of ‘ability.’ Perhaps the translator was thinking of Ludwig Witt-
18
genstein who, in his Philosophical Investigations, found that the semantics of the word
19 ‘know’ was obviously closely related to the semantics of words like ‘can,’ ‘be able to,’
20 ‘be capable of ’ (1960: 356). In his examination of Greek texts, Bruno Snell (1924: 83)
21
had already noted that the expression episteme (as well as the verb epistamai) is not
merely knowledge about a fact or a certain circumstance, but rather describes the under-
22
standing that an activity makes possible.
23

24

25

26 References
27

28 Agawu, Koﬁ and Mirka, Danuta (eds.) (2008). Communicative Strategies in Music of the
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Austin John L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Bally Charles (1926). Le langage et la vie. Paris: Payot.
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Bally, Charles (1965). Linguistique generale et linguistique francaise. Berne: Francke.
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Benveniste, Emile (1966). Problemes de linguistique generale vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard.
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Benveniste, Emile (1974). Problemes de linguistique generale, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard.
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Bu¨hler, Karl (1990 [1934]). Theory of Language. The Representational Function of Language.
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Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
36 Castaneda H. N. (1967). Indicators and quasi-indicators. American Philosophy Quarterly
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38 Ducrot, Oswald (1984). Le dire et le dit. Paris: Minuit.
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Grice, Paul (1975). Logic and conversation. In Speech Acts: Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3,
P. Cole and J.-L. Morgan (eds.), 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
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Jullien, B. (1849). Cours Complet d’Education pour les Filles. Paris: Hachette.
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1 Lyons, John (1982). Deixis and subjectivity: Loquor, ergo sum? In Speech, Place, and
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Action, R. J. Jarvella and W. Klein (eds.), 101–124. Chichester: John Wiley.
Perry, J. (1979). The problem of the essential indexical. Nous 3, 3–21.
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Perry, J. (2000). The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays. Stanford: CSLI.
4 Polanyi, Michael (1974 [1958]). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy.
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6 Ryle, Gilbert (1986 [1949]). The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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´ ´ ` ` ´
Saussure Louis de (in press). Quelle realite derriere l’hypothese polyphonique? In Melanges
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o¤erts a Andre Rousseau, C. Muller (ed.), PAGE NUMBERS. PLACE: PUBLISHER.
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Snell, B. (1924). Die Ausdrucke fur den Begri¤ des Wissens in der vorplatonischen Philoso-
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9 phie Berlin (¼ Philological Investigations Heft 29), A. Kiessling and U. v. Wilamowitz-
10 Moellendor¤ (eds.). Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.
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Sperber Dan and Wilson, Deirdre (1978). Les ironies comme mentions. Poetique 36, ´
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Sperber Dan and Wilson, Deirdre (1981). Irony and the use-mention distinction. In Radical
14 Pragmatics, P. Cole (ed.), 295–318. New York: Academic Press.
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Stein, Dieter and Wright, Susan (eds.) (1995). Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic
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Louis De Saussure (b. 1967) is a Full Professor at University of Neuchatel 3louis.ˆ
23
desaussure@unine.ch4. His research interests include semantics, pragmatics, and discourse.
24 ´ ´ ´ ´
His publications include ‘Parallelisme et linearite de l’interpretation: remarques sur un cas
25 ´
de causalite inverse’ (2005); ‘Manipulation and cognitive pragmatics: Preliminary hypothe-
26 ses’ (2005); ‘Procedural pragmatics and the study of discourse’ (2007); and ‘Pragmatic issues
27
in discourse analysis’ (2007).
28
Peter Schulz (b. 1958) is a Professor at the University of Lugano 3Peter.Schulz@lu.unisi.
29 ch4. His research interests include health communication and sign theories regarding subjec-
30 tivity and inter-subjectivity. His publications include New Perspectives on Manipulative and
31 Ideological Discourse in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis (with L. Saussure, 2004); Freund-
32
schaft und Selbstliebe bei Platon und Aristoteles. Semantische Studien zur Subjektivitat und
¨
Intersubjektivitat (2000) Geschichte und Vorgeschichte der modernen Subjektivita (with R. L.
¨ ¨t
33
Fetz and R. Hagenbuchle, 1998).
¨
34

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37

38
39

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